[BRLTTY] Blinking glyphs (was: Re: Unicode braille patterns)

[Aura Kelloniemi]

Hi

I could not resist the temptation to speak up.

Lars Bjørndal <lars at lamasti.net> writes:
 > Just a thoght; could the braille pattern characters be set to blink on the display, on request?

Yes please, but please, may it be configurable.

I have, for many years, wanted to have the blinking capitals preference to be
generalized, so that I could:

1) Define myself which characters blink,
2) Define some dots in a glyph as blinking.

I would use the feature 2 to distinguish between different accent types that
letters can have. Dave would ask "Why?" and I am answering this question in
advance:

Because I personally feel that if the whole character is blinking, it is
difficult to read it. It takes much more time for me to detect what the
blinking glyph actually is, and it slows down my reading speed. On the other
hand, if only one or two dots of a character are blinking, the other dots are
always visible, and I can detect, the base type of the glyph – i.e. I notice
that it is a letter, and I even notice which letter it is, but I'm not
necessarily sure if it has an accent or not, before I see the blinking dot
appear/disappear. Sometimes, if I read fast, it does not matter, but often I
really want to know which accent it is, and I can detect this information from
the blinking dots. Of course, I could always use DESCCHAR, but if I am reading
a language which uses a lot of accents, I would need to check every letter for
an accent, or make a special glyph for each accent+letter combination, for
which there is no enough expression potential in a single braille cell.

For people, who don't care about accented letters, I can find some other
exampels that they might care about: for example circled, bold or italic
letters exist in Unicode. These could be represented by adding a blinking dot
8 to base glyph.

I have delayed sending this feature request, because I have
been thinking that it would be a lot of work, but now that this blinking
glyphs thing came up, I thought that it would be a good time to see, if there
is anybody else who would want to have this kind of a thing.

-- 
Aura